Compassion

Sunday 22nd August 2010
If an omnivore feels compassionate by nature, how do they feel when they meet someone (a vegan) who accuses them of not caring about animals? Is there conflict?
Imagine how any value judgement can make you feel – “liar”, “cheat”, “brute” … they’re attacks on the relationship, especially if they’re evidence-backed. Even more so if they’re true.
When a vegan condemns an omnivore for not being bothered about animal cruelty it can cut deep. It questions one’s compassion. I think most “no-use-animals”-messages come across this way. They attack on two fronts; not caring; not grasping the logic.
It’s as if we see omnivores as incapable of taking a logical approach to their decision making, particularly in the case of vegan food. We’d say it’s a simple failure of intelligence … coupled with heartlessness. Our double whammy attack intends to hit hard.
For omnivores, defending themselves from vegan attack, they’ll seek to lessen the impact. If the attack has hit home, and vegans usually know the omnivore’s Achilles heel, it will say “you have no brain and no heart”. It’s difficult for any omnivore to wriggle out of this - the truer the accusation the harder the attack feels. The omnivore will strike back more violently, the sharper the vegan’s sting.
Contrary to ‘standard vegan view’ attacking doesn’t help. It doesn’t stimulate self examination, but the very opposite. On no account will the omnivore see themselves as wayward – they being right by way of being in the majority (indeed, the vast majority). It is natural for ‘dominant humans’ to meet attack with derision and then counter attack.
At first glance the confidence behind their defence is astonishing … until you realise that conventional thinking has a lot of ‘majority-think’ behind it, enough even to question the integrity or sanity of the attacker. For them, what is in questioned here is so fundamental to life (eating food) and so universal amongst humans in every country in the world (eating animal foods) that personal change is pointless.
Vegans, of course, don’t see it that way!!